Date of online availability

Date of online availability is the metadata field recording when a work was first made accessible online, used specifically in cases where the more familiar term “date of publication” does not cleanly apply. It exists because a growing share of research outputs do not go through a conventional publication process at all — a practice-based output, a thesis deposited in an institutional repository, or content shared on a social or subject-specific networking platform — and for these, recording “when did this become available” is more accurate and more useful to a citing reader than forcing the metadata into a publication-date field that implies a formal editorial process the output never went through.

How it relates to other date fields

Date of online availability is distinct from date of publication, which applies once a work does go through formal publication, and from date of online publication, which specifically marks when a formally published work’s online version became available (relevant for works with separate online-first and print dates). Where a work first shared online is later formally published, date of online availability should only be reused for the published record if the published content is substantially the same as what was originally made available — a preprint that was materially revised through peer review before formal publication is a different case, and the published work should carry its own publication date rather than inheriting the preprint’s availability date.

Getting this field right matters for correctly establishing priority and for citation practice: a reader or a competing research group relies on it to know when a claim first entered the public record, independent of whatever formal publication timeline followed.